Grounding Symbols in Perception with two Interacting Autonomous Robots

Abstract

Grounding symbolic representations in perception is a key and difficult issue for artificial intelligence. The ”Talking Heads” experiment (Steels and Kaplan, 2002) explores an interesting coupling between grounding and social learning of language. In the first version of this experiment, two cameras were interacting in a simplified visual environment made of colored shapes on a white board and they developed a shared, grounded lexicon. We present here the beginning of a new experiment which is an extension of the original one with two autonomous robots instead of two cameras and a complex and unconstrained visual environment. We review the difficulties raised specifically by the embodiment of the agents and propose some directions to address these questions.